Glamour Lives, in Chinese Films

Manohla Dargis observes that the glamour has gone east:

American screens are now awash in interchangeable blonds with hungry mouths and empty eyes, but in the 1930's and 1940's movie stars were divine, agleam with enchantment. By the end of the 1950's, glamour was as eroded as the studio system. No-holds-barred rock 'n' roll and foreign-language cinema did their part to kill glamour, as did Dr. Kinsey, by taking the mystery out of sex and leaving less and less to the imagination. By the time Marilyn Monroe laid down her peroxide head for good in 1962, glamour was a goner. Monroe wore it like a mink stole, tossing it aside when it no longer fit. She had searched for another, truer self, but in the end it wasn't the Actors Studio student in glasses who became immortal.

... and:

Mr. Hou, Mr. Wong and Mr. Zhang could not be more different visionaries, but each in his way reveals glamour to be as much a construction as a movie set is. In Mr. Hou's "Flowers of Shanghai," the glamour of the brothel is a hypnotic lie, a facade hiding a decadent, doomed world. In Mr. Wong's films, especially those set in the 1960's, glamour exalts the characters; it's what makes their everyday reality transcendent. Yet while glamour is a construction for these filmmakers, it's also sincere; there's nothing ironic about the downcast eyes and yearning mouths they immortalize. "There wasn't much laughing in those photos," Willinger said of the photographs he shot at MGM. "You couldn't have happy sex. Sex and earnestness - together those spelled glamour." He could have been talking about House of Flying Daggers.

As well as Ms. Dargis writes, do you really have to look at anything beyond the three women in the header before you start agreeing with the theory?